AUBURN – Owners of bigger apartment buildings will pay for trash collections, councilors decided Monday.
The City Council voted 5-2 to begin charging $80 per unit annually for trash collections at buildings of four or more units. Councilors Belinda Gerry and Bob Mennealy voted against the plan. A building would be exempt from the fee if the landlord lives there, according to the proposal.
City Manager Pat Finnigan said the city would begin mailing information about the fee to landlords in the next few weeks. They will be asked to choose city collections or to hire a private contractor sometime this month.
“We haven’t set a deadline yet,” Finnigan said. “We expect it will be sometime in mid-November.”
The new fee should generate about $30,000 between December and next June and $60,000 for the city per year after that. The fee is part of the the city’s $58.8 million budget approved in June, Finnigan said. Councilors approved a 94-cent property tax hike balanced with $780,000 in budget cuts – including cuts in the trash collections budget.
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